In many areas of foodstuffs technology, it is desirable for certain amounts of foodstuffs to be prepared in portions which are as accurate as possible.
While the portioning of liquid or free-flowing materials takes place without problems or substantially without problems, the portioning of foodstuffs which do not flow has to be considered to be something other than optimum.
For example, during the production and further processing of meat products, it would be desirable if, for example, beef, pork or turkey meat could be cut and prepared in portions which are as identical as possible. Correspondingly equally sized portions of meat could then be processed further or sold optimally.
Corresponding calibrating devices have also been disclosed, for example, for shaped and processed meat, in which the meat is initially processed and pressed together again in such a manner that it assumes a certain shape. However, for the time being this requires the stringy meat to be processed into very small pieces or involves utilizing meat residues.
A calibrated cutting installation having a shaping tube for feeding the meat to a cutting device in order to separate meat into portions which are as far as possible of equal size by means of a cutter has already been disclosed. The shaping tube can be separated into two parts in the longitudinal direction. The end of the shaping tube, at a so-called delivery hole, is adjoined by a pot-shaped or shell-shaped depressions, the size and volume of which predetermine the corresponding portion. Then, a cutter can be moved through a in a spacer gap between the feed hole of the shaping tube and the abovementioned calibrated shaping cavity, the oblique arrangement of the cutting edges of which cutter causes a pulling cut, with the result that the corresponding amount of meat situated in the calibrated shaping cavity can be separated from the large remaining amount of meat situated in the shaping tube.
Then, the pot-shaped calibrating plate can be moved in order, if appropriate by means of further auxiliary measures, to remove the amount of meat which is situated in the calibrating cavity from the calibrating cavity and, for example, to deliver it to a conveyor belt.
However, the calibrated cutting device just mentioned has a number of drawbacks.
It has emerged that it is not always possible to ensure that the calibrating cavity is filled as uniformly as possible with the known calibrated cutting device. This is despite the fact that the calibrating cavity is designed more in the shape of a soup-dish, i.e. has a concave curve at the transition from the base area to the side wall area, avoiding a sharp edge, so that, as far as possible, inclusions of air are prevented. In addition, vacuum suction lines emerge from the area of the base of the calibrating cavity, in order to use a further suction device to pull in each case the next portion of meat optimally into the calibrating cavity. However, in this case too it has been found that the meat which is to be processed partially closes the suction passages which are present, so that air bubbles which are situated at a different location between the meat portion and the calibrating cavity cannot be sucked out. Ultimately, this leads to the size and weight of the meat portions which are to be separated differing considerably, at least in relative terms.
In view of the above, working on the basis of the abovementioned prior art, the object of the invention is to provide an improved calibrated cutting device which can be used to portion foodstuffs that are suitable for cutting, in particular meat, as optimally as possible, with the minimum possible weight and/or volume discrepancies.